Film and DVD links and reviews
October 13th 1924 Dir Donald Crisp / Buster Keaton 59mins [/fusion_youtube] Buster Keaton's all at sea again, as the unwitting, hapless hero of this brilliant silent comedy where his genius for visual gags and narrative direction (he co-directed the film with Donald Crisp), can still entertain and enthrall us nearly a century [...]
Inspirational winter passage by Erik Aanderaa, a true latter-day Viking, sailing his Contessa 35 Tessie from Haugasund in Norway to the three-day Up Helly Aa winter Viking festival at Lerwick in Shetland (in 30 hrs!) on 29 January this year. In temperatures are around 1ºC Erik gets onto the foredeck (sans harness tut-tut) to tell [...]
Documentary 2018 Dir: Alex Holmes 93 mins Maiden opens in UK cinemas on Friday 8th March This is a truly inspirational film. It takes us back a bit, though not too far, to 1989 and the Round the World Whitbread – a gruelling nine-month yacht race presided over by lantern-jawed skippers and winch-grinding gorillamen, testosterone [...]
1975, Dir: David Gowing, 51 mins The old timers speak out across the decades, of their times working in the Thames Sailing Barges, a shoal draught coastal freight carrier that had not changed much since the 1600s. The film is made by documentary maker and keen sailor David Gowing and consists of archive footage spliced [...]
This is a fabulous short animated film with Ian McShane playing an old Bristol Channel Pilot skipper (and Pilot) Wm Avery who feels washed up and unwanted in the age of steam. He's on a solo passage to Fiddlers Green, beyond the western approaches when a girl, Lara Conrad played by Cathy Ang, falls off [...]
This list of our favourite films about the sea is of course subjective, but we did set ourselves some criteria – that we wanted from all the films here. Firstly the list is put together with the Snugberth cinema in mind, so these are not instructional films where a man with a clipped [...]
1992, Dir Ridley Scott, Paramount etc, UK15, DVD, 154 min Visiting Seville in 1992 and seeing and then going aboard the replicas of the Nina, Pinto and Santa Maria was an experience to be remembered. Faithfully re-interpreted and built for this film, the boats smelt of tar, and yes, life aboard. The film itself was [...]
1979 Dir: Tony Maylam 102 mins Erskine Childers’ classic novel hardly needs recommendation to Classic Sailors. This film version was made at the height of the 1970s vogue for elegant, accurate, authentically British adaptations of period literary classics, though it failed to capture the family market in the same way as The Railway Children (with [...]
2006 Dir: Louise Osmond, Jerry Rothwell 93mins Documentary In a year when there have been two movies made about Donald Crowhurst and his ill-fated quest to win the Golden Globe Race in 1968, it’s salutory to be citing this 2006 documentary as one of our favourite sailing films. And that’s because it’s brilliantly put together, [...]
